Today we’ll show you a baby Killdeer up close and personal! Before we do, though, please know I would never pick up a young bird for any reason other than dire straits, so it’s odd to have a pictures such as this and I suspect I’ll never have one again. I would never, ever disturb a bird for the sake of a picture. But, as you’ll learn in our story below I had no choice but to handle this one. And as long as I was forced to handle it, I took the rare opportunity to get a picture!

(This is not current. It was from 2008.)

Here’s how I came to have this little guy in my hand. We were going about our normal activities one afternoon when we realized there was a Killdeer out in the yard being much more “squawk-y” than usual. Now, if you know anything about Killdeer, you know they are loud. Even on a normal day, they’ve got a piercing sort of call that we’ve come to love. But it has to grow on you. So for awhile we didn’t pay much attention to the bird. Babies had recently left the nest and we’d often hear the parents calling to the chicks encouraging them to follow.

This was a more urgent call, though, and it went on and on and on. We realized something was wrong, it was not normal. It didn’t take us too long to realize one of the babies had fallen into our window well. So, thank heavens for my better half who immediately crawled over the four foot fence surrounding the deep well to rescue the baby! I stayed above ground waiting for the hand-off! We laid him down in a shaded area of the yard. He immediately found his mama and off they went together happy as clams!

In current news, our Killdeer pair are happily incubating their four eggs with nothing eventful happening. We’ll be back in a few days with another update.